Remote workers are generally less productive than onsite workers for my company (100k+) employees
Threatening to quit is fine simply because hiring has never been easier for us. I’m sure it’s even easier at Google scale.
Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
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Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#72One of the most low-value words in a headline or statement is "some".
If you take any scenario and ask a large enough group of people their opinions, there's going to inevitably be an arbitrary number (that can then be qualified as some) that will have the reactionary view that makes for an eye catching headline.
Put simply, "some" is just vague enough to allow these article writers to get a clickbait headline from a statement that only a handful of people have made. It's lazy and disingenuous, which are two words I've found myself using to describe the journalism industry as a whole lately.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that like senior management typically makes decisions based on data and facts, rather than the reality where they just shoot from the hip using their "gut." By the same logic implied here, we cannot trust senior management to know what they're doing. PS - Also Google's measures of productivity are terrible, that's why they keep starting/killing new projects ever other week, and killed their golden goose in th…
Can't trust the senior managers of one of the largest revenue generating companies on the plant? With probably the highest Revenue per employee ever in the history of modern business (if not highest, up there). I dunno, seems like they are doing ok at their jobs....
98%+ of Google’s senior managers today weren’t around when the company originally pioneered and grew the business lines that pay those manager’s salaries.
They didn’t build the ship, they’re just passengers.
Hence why most companies fall out of the S&P 500 as quickly as they rise. If you think Google is going to stay on top forever you’re in for a rude awakening.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#74> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
Most major corporations have teams of mixed offshore and onshore developers. If it was okay to have the offshore part of the team working from outside the office before the pandemic, I don't see why onshore developers wouldn't deserve the same treatment now.
It's not even a case of onshore vs offshore, companies that manufacture physical things and have even a shred of vertical integration have always done this. The corporate office is in a different state than the manufacturing facility which is in a different state from the R&D facility which is in a different state than that company that used to be your contractor that you acquired a decade ago, etc. etc. And they've managed to do this successfully even before video chat and email, some of them since before the telephone.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. Out of curiosity, how many of the people you have spoken to have kids? From my perspective, it seems the people without kids seem to handle working from home okay, but the ones with younger kids at home seem to struggle a lot.
I have young kids and WFH. They go to childcare/preschool during the day. For me, a flexible WFH schedule has been extremely helpful while starting a family. That said, I understand not everyone’s WFH environment is the same.
I take the grandparent comment meant kids at home. In some areas day care have been closed.
I first joked with my wife about finally being able to have sex during meetings at the start of the WFH mandate, but it actually turned out to be more about changing diapers during meetings, and general background screaming for most of the day.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#76It seems strange that Google management would push so hard on this. Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. What possible upside could there be that justifies forcing the issue and hurting morale by pissing so many people off? Sure, maybe there's an argument that a fully remote company has a hard time propagating a coherent corporate culture.…
I'm an engineering manager and everyone on my teams has a different specific vision of "perfect" but all want "more flexibility". I think we can do this but it's both (1) new and (2) more complicated. The bigger you are the more efficiency benefit to adopting a one size fits all approach, even if it fails some.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?
I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the us…
When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework.
It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that.
If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all.
All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#78Google said they would allow WFH until July 2021 last year: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/tech/google-work-from-home-ex.... They're extending that to September. Googlers knew what was coming.
In my brief experience there, Google was staunchly against remote work, even remote work between office locations. A big reason behind me leaving (aside from not enjoying the work) was that I wanted to work from an office in another state but was told that wouldn't be possible despite the recruiter I was working with saying otherwise. The work could have 100% been done from another office (or from anywhere, really), but, nope, not possible.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#79It seems strange that Google management would push so hard on this. Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. What possible upside could there be that justifies forcing the issue and hurting morale by pissing so many people off? Sure, maybe there's an argument that a fully remote company has a hard time propagating a coherent corporate culture.…
I think it really is better to have everyone on a team doing the same thing. Fully remote teams work fine and fully in person teams work fine. The worst case scenario is an in person team with one remote person. When you get closer to 50/50, that is better but still not great. I think it is understandable that companies want to extend this recognition all the way to the company level. I don't like it, I think it's better (but harder, logistically) to handle it at a lower level, like within teams or product areas, but I can understand their thinking. I expect there to be a lot of self-sorting after the pandemic, between teams / divisions / companies that are remote and those that are in person.
Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. Certainly not the case for everyone. Many people are struggling to be productive at home, alone. Jobs that require more coordination are also at risk of slowing down. WFH is great for some, but it’s not a panacea.
How many of them have slowed down b/c of the pandemic vs WFH? I can imagine a job being a lot harder if suddenly your children are home all day, heck my kids aren't even school age and my wife is home fulltime and I still sometimes have my little ones come in asking for juice or to help them put on their shirt, or something like that. Not to mention the additional stress and isolation that comes from all of the pande…
this matches my experience as a dev manager. We had a bump in productivity initially, probably due to a fully-charged battery of team combined with less disruptions, but now productivity has declined by all our quantative measures (deploys, cycle times, failure frequency,etc). These are all proxies and not prefectly isolated, but better than "gut feel"